What I did not understand, for twenty-two years, is that there are people whose regard you genuinely can earn through excellence, and there are people for whom your excellence is precisely the problem — people who do not want you to succeed, who need you not to succeed, because their whole sense of themselves depends on your remaining beneath them.

To the first kind of person, your achievement is a gift you offer.

To the second kind, it is a threat you commit.

And the tragedy of my childhood is that I kept offering gift after gift, achievement after achievement, to people of the second kind, and could not understand why each one made them angrier instead of prouder.

I thought I simply hadn’t done enough yet.

I thought the next scholarship, the next fellowship, the next job would be the one that tipped the scale.